Designing Advanced Educational Media
What do we need to know about how people make meaning across different media in order to design more effective next-generation learning environments? In immersive media, users must integrate, on multiple timescales, the meanings they make across genres, representations, sensory channels, activities, and virtual spaces. I am beginning to investigate immersive, navigable three-dimensional computer gameworlds as a possible medium in which to study multi-modal, multi-scale meaning-making strategies. The tools of software usability research studies can generate data to analyze trajectories and strategies through complex virtual environments in which multiple types of learning take place. I believe such basic research is essential for the design of advanced educational media for the future.
See I3W: Investigating Interactive
Immersive Worlds
See links for the TRAVERSALS project.
See also new work on the chronotopes of learning.
Re-engineering Education
A major responsibility of educational researchers and theorists is to articulate visions of possible educational futures. A great need of today's society is for a coherent vision of how to overcome the dysfunctional structural features of our now centuries-old model of education-by-schooling. How can we help students learn by synthesizing internship and service learning, learning from online and intelligent tutoring systems, learning in interactive immersive environment and simulations, learning in mixed-age groups, reflective and critical learning in teacher-guided discussions, and generally more open and flexible paradigms of learning and education than what the schools and curricula of the past have been designed to accommodate?
Semiotics in the Dynamics of Multi-scale Systems and Networks
Theoretical work on the role of semiotics and informational transformations in the dynamics of complex, self-organizing systems. Proposes that systems of interest produce emergent levels of organization with characteristic dynamical timescales that are intermediate between those of pre-existing levels and do so typically by transforming lower level continuous variation into higher level discrete variants and vice versa in an alternating pattern across scales of organization.
New work in this area examines the role of semiotic artifacts, including the legible human body, in linking social practices and processes at radically different timescales (semiotic heterochrony). A further development of the model considers how meanings are made at different timescales along our traversals across institutions and sites. See Traversal Theory under New Additions.
See also Multiple Timescale Analysis.